The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination

Written: Written in German not earlier than October 16 (29), 1915
Published:
First published in 1927 in Lenin Miscellany VI.
Published according to the translation from the German made by N. K. Krupskaya, with corrections by V. I. Lenin.
Source:Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[197[4]],
Moscow,
Volume 21,
pages 407-414.
Translated:Transcription\Markup:D. Walters and R. CymbalaPublic Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
2003
(2005).
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
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Like most programmes or tactical resolutions of the Social-Democratic
parties, the Zimmerwald Manifesto proclaims the “right of nations to
self-determination”. In Nos. 252 and 253 of Berner
Tagwacht,
Parabellum[5] has called “illusory” “the
struggle for the non-existent right to self-determination”, and
has contraposed to it “the proletariat’s
revolutionary mass struggle against capitalism”, while at the same
time assuring us that “we are against annexations” (an
assurance is repeated five times in Parabellum’s article), and
against all violence against nations.

The arguments advanced by Parabellum in support of his position boil down
to an assertion that today all national problems, like those of
Alsace-Lorraine, Armenia, etc., are problems of imperialism; that capital
has outgrown the framework of national states; that it is impossible to turn
the clock of history back to the obsolete ideal of national states, etc.

First of all, it is Parabellum who is looking backward, not forward,
when, in opposing working-class acceptance “of the ideal of the
national state”, he looks towards Britain, France, Italy, Germany,
i. e., countries where the movement for nalional liberation is a thing of
the past, and not towards the East, towards Asia, Africa, and the colonies,
where this movement is a thing of the present and the future. Mention of
India, China, Persia, and Egypt will be sufficient.

Furthermore, imperialism means that capital has outgrown the framework of
national states; it means that national oppression has been extended and
heightened on a new historical foundation. Hence, it follows that, despite
Parabellum, we must link the revolutionary struggle for socialism
with a revolutionary programme on the national question.

From what Parabellum says, it appears that, in the name of the
socialist revolution, he scornfully rejects a consistently revolutionary
programme in the sphere of democracy. He is wrong to do so. The proletariat
cannot be victorious except through democracy, i.e., by giving full effect
to democracy and by linking with each step of its struggle democratic
demands formulated in the most resolute terms. It is absurd to
contrapose the socialist revolutlon and the revolutionary struggle
against capitalism to a single problem of democracy, in this case,
the national question. We must combine the revolutionary struggle
against capitalism with a revolutionary programme and tactics on all
democratic demands: a republic, a militia, the popular election of
officials, equal rights for women, the self-determillation of nations,
etc. While capitalism exists, these demands—all of them—can only
be accomplished as an exception, and even then in an incomplete and
distorted form. Basing ourselves on the democracy already achieved, and
exposing its incompleteness under capitalism, we demand the overthrow of
capitalism, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, as a necessary basis both
for the abolition of the poverty of the masses and for the complete
and all-round institution of all democratic reforms. Some
of these reforms will be started before the overthrow of the bourgeoisie,
others in the course of that overthrow, and still others after
it. The social revolution is not a single battle, but a period covering a
series of battles over all sorts of problems of economic and democratic
reform, which are consummated only by the expropriation of the
bourgeoisie. It is for the sake of this final aim that we must formulate
every one of our democratic demands in a consistently revolutionary
way. It is quite conceivable that the workers of some particular country
will overthrow the bourgeoisie before even a single fundamental
democratic reform has been fully achieved. It is, however, quite
inconceivable that the proletariat, as a historical class, will be able to
defeat the bourgeoisie, unless it is prepared for that by being educated in
the spirit of the most consistent and resolutely revolutionary
democracy.

Imperialism means the progressively mounting oppression of the nations of
the world by a handful of Great Powers; it means a period of wars between
the latter to extend and consolidate the oppression of nations; it means a
period in which the masses of the people are deceived by hypocritical
social-patriots, i.e., individuals who, under the pretext of the
“freedom of nations”, “the right of nations to
self-determination”, and “defence of the fatherland”,
justify and defend the oppression of the majority of the world’s
nations by the Great Powers.

That is why the focal point in the Social-Democratic programme must be
that division of nations into oppressor and oppressed which forms the
essence of imperialism, and is deceitfully evaded by the
social-chauvinists and Kautsky. This division is not significant from the
angle of bourgeois pacifism or the philistine Utopia of peaceful competition
among independent nations under capitalism, but it is most significant from
the angle of the revolutionary struggle against imperialism. It is from this
division that our definition of the “right of nations to
self-determination” must follow, a definition that is consistently
democratic, revolutionary, and in accord with the general task of
the immediate struggle for socialism. It is for that right, and in a
struggle to achieve sincere recognition for it, that the Social-Democrats of
the oppressor nations must demand that the oppressed nations should have the
right of secession, for otherwise recognition of equal rights for nations
and of international working-class solidarity would in fact be merely empty
phrase-mongering, sheer hypocrisy. On the other hand, the Social-Democrats
of the oppressed nations must attach prime significance to the unity and the
merging of the workers of the oppressed nations with those of the oppressor
nations; otherwise these Social-Democrats will involuntarily become the
allies of their own national bourgeoisie, which always betrays the
interests of the people and of democracy, and is always ready, in
its turn, to annex territory and oppress other nations.

The way in which the national question was posed at the end of the
sixties of the past century may serve as an instructive example. The
petty-bourgeois democrats, to whom any thought of the class struggle and of
the socialist revolution was wholly alien, pictured to themselves a Utopia
of peaceful competition among free and equal nations, under capitalism. In
examining the immediate tasks of the social revolution, the Proudhonists
totally “negated” the national question and the right of nations
to self-determination. Marx ridiculed French Proudhonism and showed the
affinity between it and French chauvinism. (“All Europe must and will
sit quietly on their hindquarters until the gentlemen in France abolish
‘poverty’. . . . By the negation of nationalities they appeared,
quite unconsciously, to understand their absorption by the model French
nation.”) Marx demanded the separation of Ireland from
Britain “although after the separation there may come
federation”, demanding it, not from the standpoint of the
petty-bourgeois Utopia of a peaceful capitalism, or from considerations of
“justice for
Ireland”,[6] but from the standpoint of the
interests of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of the
oppressor, i.e., British, nation against
capitalism. The freedom of that nation has been cramped and mutilated by the
fact that it has oppressed another nation. The British proletariat’s
internationalism would remain a hypocritical phrase if they did not
demand the separation of Ireland. Never in favour of petty states, or the
splitting up of states in general, or the principle of federation, Marx
considered the separation of an oppressed nation to be a step towards
federation, and consequently, not towards a split, but towards
concentration, both political and economic, but concentration on the basis
of democracy. As Parabellum sees it, Marx was probably waging an
“illusory struggle” in demanding separation for
Ireland. Actually, however, this demand alone presented a consistently
revolutionary programme; it alone was in accord with internationalism; it
alone advocated concentration along non-imperialist lines.

The imperialism of our days has led to a situation in which the
Great-Power oppression of nations hss become gengral. The view that a
struggle must be conducted against the social-chauvinism of the dominant
nations, who are
now engaged in an imperialist war to enhance the oppression
of nations, and are oppressing most of the world’s nations and most of
the earth’s population—this view must be decisive, cardinal and
basic in the national programme of Social-Democracy.

Take a glance at the present trends in Social-Democratic thinking on this
subject. The petty-bourgeois Utopians, who dreamt of equality and peace
among nations under capitalism, have been succeeded by the
social-imperialists. In combating the former, Parabellum is tilting at
windmills, thereby unwittingly playing in the hands of the
social-imperialists. What is the social-chauvinists’ programme on the
national question?

They either entirely deny the right to self-determination, using
arguments like those advanced by Parabellum (Cunow, Parvus, the Russian
opportunists Semkovsky, Liebman, and others), or they recognise that right
in a patently hypocritical fashion, namely, without applying it to those
very nations that are oppressed by their own nation or by her military
allies (Plekhanov, Hyndman, all the pro-French patriots, then Scheidemann,
etc., etc.). The most plausible formulation of the social-chauvinist lie,
one that is therefore most dangerous to the proletariat, is provided by
Kautsky. In word, he is in favour of the self-determination of nations; in
word, he is for the Social-Democratic Party “die Selbstandigkeit
der Nationen allseitig [!] und rückhaltlos [?] achtet
und
fordert”[1]
(Die Neue Zeit No. 33, II, S. 241, May
21, 1915). In deed, however, he has adapted the national programme to the
prevailing social-chauvinism, distorted and docked it; he gives no precise
definition of the duties of the socialists in the oppressor nations, and
patently falsifies the democratic principle itself when he says that to
demand “state independence” (staatliche Selb standigkeit)
for every nation would mean demanding “too much” (“zu
viel”, Die Neue Zeit No. 33, II, S. 77, April 16,
1915). “National autonomy”, if you please, is enough! The
principal question, the one the imperialist bourgeoisie will not permit
discussion of, namely, the question of the
boundaries of a state
that is built upon the oppression of nations, is evaded by Kautsky, who, to
please that bourgeoisie, has thrown out of the programme what is most
essential. The bourgeoisie are ready to promise all the “national
equality” and “national autonomy” you please, so long as the
proletariat remain within the framework of legality and
“peacefully” submit to them on the question of the state
boundaries! Kautsky has formulated the national programme of
Social-Democracy in a reformist, not a revolutionary manner.

Parabellum’s national programme, or, to be more precise, his
assurances that “we are against annexations”, has the
wholehearted backing of the
Parteivorstand,[2]
Kautsky, Plekhanov
and Co., for the very reason that the programme does not expose the dominant
social-patriots. Bourgeois pacifists would also endorse that
programme. Parabellum’s splendid general programme (“a
revolutionary mass struggle against capitalism”) serves him—as
it did the Proudhonists of the sixties—not for the drawing up, in
conformity with it and in its spirit, of a programme on the national
question that is uncompromising and equally revolutionary, but in order to
leave the way open to the social-patriots. In our imperialist times most
socialists throughout the world are memhers of nations that oppress other
nations and strive to extend that oppression. That is why our
“struggle against annexations” will be meaningless and will not
scare the social-patriots in the least, unless we declare that a socialist
of an oppressor nation who does not conduct both peacetinue and wartime
propaganda in favour of freedom of secession for oppressed nations, is no
socialist and no internationalist, but a chauvinist! The socialist of an
oppressor nation who fails to conduct such propaganda in defiance of
government bans, i.e., in the free, i.e., in the illegal press, is a
hypocritical advocate of equal rights for nations!

Parabellum has only a
single sentence on Russia, which has not yet completed its
bourgeois-democratic revolution:

That is not a “Social-Democratic standpoint” but a
liberal-bourgeois one, not an internationalist, but a Great-Russian
chauvinist standpoint. Parabellum, who is such a fine fighter against the
German social-patriots, seems to have little knowledge of Russian
chauvinism. For Parabellum’s wording to be converted into a
Social-Democratic postulate and for Social-Democratic conclusions to be
drawn from it, it should be modified and supplemented as follows:

Russia is a prison of peoples, not only because of the military-feudal
character of tsarism and not only because the Great-Russian bourgeoisie
support tsarism, but also because the Polish, etc., bourgeoisie have
sacrificed the freedom of nations and democracy in general for the
interests of capitalist expansion. The Russian proletariat cannot march at
the head of the people towards a victorious democratic revolution (which
is its immediate task), or fight alongside its brothers, the proletarians
of Europe, for a socialist revolution, without immediately demanding,
fully and
“rückhaltlos”,[4]
for all nations
oppressed by tsarism, the freedom to secede from Russia. This we demand,
not independently of our revolutionary struggle for socialism, but because
this struggle will remain a hollow phrase if it is not linked up with a
revolutionary approach to all questions of democracy, including the
national question. We demand freedom of self-determination, i.e.,
independence, i.e., freedom of secession for the oppressed
nations, not because we have dreamt of splitting up the country
economically, or of the ideal of small states, but, on the contrary,
because we want large states and the closer unity and even fusion of
nations, only on a truly democratic, truly internationalist basis, which
is inconceivable without the freedom to secede. Just as Marx, in 1869,
demanded the separation of Ireland, not for a split between Ireland and
Britain, but for a subsequent free union between them, not so as to secure
“justice for Ireland”, but in the interests of the
revolutionary struggle of the British proletariat, we in the same way
consider the refusal of Russian socialists to demand freedom of
self-determination for nations, in the sense we have indicated above, to
be a direct betrayal of democracy, internationalism and socialism.

Notes

[3]
“Even
economically very backward Russia has proved, in the stand taken by the
Polish, Lettish and Armenian bourgeoisie that it is not only the military
guard that keeps together the peoples in that ‘prison of
peoples’, but also the need for capitalist expansion, for which the
vast territory is a splendid ground for
development.”—Ed.